Merchant Accountancy

Published:PravdaNo. 90, April 20, 1913.

      Signed:V. F..

      Published according to thePravdatext.Source:Lenin
	  Collected Works,

      Progress Publishers,1977,

      Moscow,Volume 19,

      pages59-60.Translated:The Late George HannaTranscription\Markup:R. CymbalaPublic Domain:Lenin Internet Archive

      (2004).You may freely copy, distribute,
	display and perform this work; as well as make derivative and
	commercial works. Please credit “Marxists Internet
	Archive” as your source.

Thebiggest millionaires, the tycoons of our big industry,
belong to a “council of congresses of industrial and commercial
representatives”. This council of congresses issues its own periodical,Promyshlennost i
Torgovlya.[1]The interests of our Kit
Kityches[2]are defended by this journal in its ponderous, elaborate and
mostly semi-literate articles.

Theyshow particular discontent at the injustice of Zemstvo
representation and Zemstvo taxation. Believe it or not, the feudal
landowner is unfair to poor Kit Kitych! Here is an instructive table
showing the composition of the elected membership at uyezd Zemstvo
assemblies[3](Promyshlennost i Torgovlya, 1913, No. 3):

Thereis indeed a crying injustice in the matter of representation in
the Zemstvos. The conclusion to be drawn is obvious and incontestable—the
Zemstvos in Russia have been put entirely into the hands of the feudal
landowners.

Theseinteresting figures must give any educated person cause to ponder
over the conditions that give rise to such unequal representation.

Itwould, of course, be ridiculous to expect the Kit Kityches and their
hack writers to be capable of pondering over general political questions or
to be interested in political knowledge. The only thing that interests Kit
Kitych is that be pays “a lot” and a member of the nobility pays
“little”. The writer hired by Kit Kitych quotes the total amounts of
Zemstvo impositions (as fixed by the official scale)—First Electoral
Assembly (24.5 million rubles in 34 gubernias with Zemstvos), Second
Electoral Assembly (49 million rubles) and village communes (45.5 million
rubles). He divides these impositions by the number of members and in this
way determines “the cost of one seat”! Thus it turns out that a seat for
a nobleman “costs” 4,500 rubles, for a merchant 38,000 rubles and for a
peasant 14,000 rubles.

Thatis how the hired advocates of the merchant class argue—election
rights are calmly examined as though they were an article of commerce. As
though those who pay the impositions fixed by the Zemstvo therebypurchasethe right to representation.

Ofcourse, there actually is glaring inequality in Zemstvo
impositions. The full burden of that inequality, however, is not borne by
the industrialists, but by thepeasantsand workers. If the
peasantry pay 45.5 million rubles that they squeeze out of their poor,
exhausted, over-cultivated land while the landowners pay 24.5 million
rubles, that can mean nothing but the extortion of millions of rublestributefrom the “muzhiks” in the form of Zemstvo impositions in
addition to all their other burdens.

Thisthe Kit Kityches do not see. What they are after is that
privileges, instead of going to the nobility alone, should be shared “on
an equal footing” with the merchants.

[1]Promyshlennosti Torgovlya(Industry and
Commerce)—the organ of the council of congresses of industrial and
commercial representatives; the journal was published in St. Petersburg
from January 1908 to December 1917. It expressed the views of the big
industrial and commercial bourgeoisie.

[2]KitKitych—the nickname of Tit Titych (Kitin
Russian means “whale”), a rich merchant in A. N. Ostrovsky’s comedyShouldering Another’s Troubles. Lenin applies the epithet to
capitalist tycoons.

[3]Zemstvos—the name by which local self-government bodies in
the rural districts were known; they were set up in the central gubernias
of tsarist Russia in 1864. The Zemstvos were dominated by the nobility and
their competence was limited to purely local economic and welfare matters
(hospital and road building, statistics, insurance, etc.). They functioned
under the control of the governors of the gubernias and the Ministry of the
Interior, which could block any decisions the government found undesirable.